Saturday, September 28, 2013

A trip to the zoo is a delightful
experience. We love looking at those animals and taking photos. They seem so
happy in their little cages. They seem to like all the attention we give them. We
never stop to think that we’re paying to have these animals imprisoned in
solitary confinement for the rest of their lives. As humans it is in our
disposition to destroy the harmony of nature and profit through the endless
torture of other species.

Your guilt of visiting and liking
zoos will increase a thousand fold when you watch Blackfish, a disturbing, revelatory film on the dangers of nabbing
animals from their natural habitat and keeping them in captivity for our
recreational purposes. Although a documentary, the film directed by Gabriela
Cowperthwaite plays out like a razor sharp thriller on large smarmy entertainment
corporations who abuse ethical boundaries and shoot animal rights to hell.

Blackfish chronicles Tilikum, an Orca who was captured in Iceland
and brought to Seaworld, a popular American marine park to entertain audiences by
performing tricks. To say that the film makes you loathe Seaworld is an
understatement – it will make you cringe in your seat and sick to your stomach with
its series of shocking exposes. Tilikum was treated like a milking commodity by
the owners of the water park, and he ended up killing a few of his trainers in
response. And appallingly, the Seaworld management not only refused to make
changes to the way they do their business, but also blamed the victims for
their own deaths.

All of that is just the tip of
the iceberg and director Cowperthwaite puts together a bunch of searing
interviews with former trainers and workers of marine parks who are now
disillusioned and recount ghastly details of the underbelly of their industry. The
filmmaker also interviews whale hunters who are absolutely disgusted with their
own selves for being in a profession that slaughters other species. The details
become more and more grim and disturbing as the film goes on, and you keep
wondering why anyone would believe that putting killer whales in a tiny tank
and making humans interact with them is a great business idea.

Seaworld refused to be
interviewed for this film and the reasons are only too obvious. There is some
horrific footage, least of which is when Tilikum grabs and drags his trainer to
the bottom of the pool out of sheer frustration. If that doesn’t turn your
stomach, the footage of hunters throwing a net and separating screaming baby
whales from their mothers certainly will. It’s heartbreaking enough to crack
open your home’s aquarium and set your pet fish free.

But this is not a sensationalist manipulative
propaganda film. Apart from its substantial research work, Blackfish really rises to greatness for the way it makes a case
against keeping killer whales in captivity by establishing the evidence that
they are highly intelligent and emotional creatures. To date there are zero reported
incidents of killer whales attacking humans in their habitat, and Tilikum was
plucked from his family and home and placed in a tank that is the human equivalent
of a bathtub to train. Three years ago the brilliant and unsettling The Cove exposed the annual mass torture
and murder of dolphins in Japan, and Blackfish
is a powerful companion piece to that film.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Prague has an interesting premise, I’ll give it that. Debutant
filmmaker Ashish Shukla and (relatively) newbie screenwriter Sumit Saxena have
lots of cool ideas and they don’t want to take the commercial route – and on
that front this is a neat little experiment. The film could have been
equally fascinating had it not supplanted cool ideas with tacky execution.

Starring the underrated Chandan
Roy Sanyal (Mikhail from Kaminey), Prague is a psychological thriller but
it merely goes through the motions of a thriller without actually delivering
the thrills. It starts off on an intriguing note, and promises some sort of a
cerebral exercise about a man who is so caught up in insecurity that his only
way to have a relationship with someone is by feeling guilt. No doubt, this is
high concept for a desi film, and that an indie film released in theaters,
despite having an unsellable story and no big stars is probably triumph enough.

Sadly Prague is not the indie film to lead a revolution, because it’s
just not a good movie. One would expect a movie about a man on the verge of a
breakdown to be zany and gripping. Unfortunately the film winds up being as exciting
as a brochure of Prague. In every scene it feels like the filmmakers used a ‘Moviemaking
for Dummies’ guidebook found at a library and missed an opportunity to make a truly
great movie with style and atmosphere worthy of its premise.

The problem is that Prague neither caters to the mainstream
crowd nor the indie enthusiasts. The former would rue the lack of item numbers
and Sallu bhai while the latter would always be 30 minutes ahead of the
characters. Any moviegoer who has watched half a dozen psychological thrillers
would crack the mystery 15 minutes into the film, and to hang around for two
whole hours knowing what’s going to happen next becomes an extremely tedious
jaunt. Even formulaic and predictable thrillers can be enjoyable if they manage
to invest you into the characters, but Prague
fails to do so.

Sanyal is talented but not
particularly interesting here, and he tries too hard, unlike his co-star Elena Kazan (from John Day) who is comparatively effortless. The characters are very
poorly written and they turn out to be just as one-dimensional, ludicrous and
unconvincing as the events that they are participating in. The dialogues range
from wannabe to cringe inducing. In one scene an idealist stoner dude lends some great advice to his friend - 'If you fuck a girl, she may or may not end up with you. But if you mindfuck a girl, she will definitely end up with you'. These gems would probably work
in films like Pyaar Ka Punchnama (which
Saxena co-wrote).

The only element of the filmthat offers a welcome break from the dreary,
amateurish and clichéd story grafted onto a two-hour ad for Prague is the music
(Atif Afzal, Varun Grover). Director Shukla gets all the music montage scenes just
right, but every single one of those scenes are so
tonally detached that they seem like they belong in another movie. Pity.

At the end of District 9 the ‘fookin prawns’ promised
that they’d come back in four years. That sort of worked as a meta for director
Neil Blomkamp because he’s back after the exact amount of time with a new, even
more bombastic film.

Don’t get your hopes too high up,
because Elysium is not as smart, lean
and gritty as District 9, but it is
WAY more action packed. It’s the masala entertainer version of sci fi, but done
with the insane dedication, passion and artistry that you expect from Blomkamp.
If you love science fiction, action films, video games and Matt Damon, Elysium is paisa vasool entertainment. You
dig Halo? There’s two dozen references to the game, including the ‘Elysium’
being Halo. You love Third Person Shooters? Yeah Blomkamp has you covered - there’s
awesome gunplay, with electrobolt rail guns shredding humans into tiny
pieces.

Do you also love a good story? That’s
where the film sort of fumbles around clumsily. It’s not that the story is bad,
but Blomkamp includes some cringe inducing cheesy flashbacks and Bollywood
style manipulative melodramatic scenes. It’s very jarring especially because
you walk in expecting a no nonsense taut film like District 9. All of the themes of racial discrimination, social
divide and elitist snobbery from D9 are redone in Elysium, but on a much grander scale, and sadly in a ham handed
manner.

If you can ignore the three-four
instances of inelegant preaching, Elysium
is a blast from start to finish. There’s not a dull moment here thanks to
the gravelly editing. The production design is incredible, from all the gleaming
futuristic hardware of the first world to the rusty crapware of the third
world. The robots are so impossibly realistic and fluid you'd think there’s a guy
wearing a robot suit. In fact the film
looks like a sprawling gigantic $250 million film when its budget is less than
half of that. More importantly the film is more rousing, epic and exciting than
most big budget films out there. More money doesn’t necessarily mean better
action, and Blomkamp demonstrates that beautifully here. When you see two guys
mauling each other in exo-suits you realize that this would’ve been the action
movie of the year had Pacific Rim not
existed.

Sharlto Copley, the protagonist
from D9 is a delightfully badass baddie here – armed to the teeth with ammo
and even a sword, with no semblance of pity or compassion. It’ll be interesting
to see what he does as the villain in the Oldboy
remake. Damon is excellent for a variety of reasons. We’ve seen him play the
unstoppable assassin fighter in the Bourne
films, and he makes an effort to distance himself from that character – he
plays an everyman who is forced into firing weapons, and he gets his ass
beaten. He wears a strength enhancing exoskeleton later on, but doesn’t become an invincible
action hero – he becomes more like Isaac Clarke from Dead Space – a nice touch to make his character more believable.

If you’re wondering why there are
so many video game references, it’s because that is exactly what this film is,
a video game adaptation, and a damn good one at that. The film is set in 2154,
the same year that Commander Shepherd from Mass
Effect was born. Young modern filmmakers like Blomkamp grew up playing video
games, and they understand what it takes to turn games into great cinema, a
feat that Hollywood has failed at over and over again. This makes me hopeful
for the upcoming Assassin’s Creed and
Duncan Jones’ Warcraft.

Over the past decade Canadian
filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has emerged as one of the most fascinating and
consistently solid filmmakers of our generation. From the mesmerizing psychological
thriller Maelstrom to the gripping
shootout drama Polytechnique to
2010’s disturbing Incendies,
Villeneuve has steadily become more adept at delving into the theme of a
traumatic incident and twisting the knife into its implications. With Prisoners he’s finally found a way to
make a commercial film on the subject with big stars.

With a dash of Zodiac, Mystic River and German thriller The Silence, Villeneuve’s Prisoners stands apart from most
Hollywood thrillers. It doesn’t follow serial killer tropes and avoids the tactic
of morbid imagery for shock value. And yet, the film manages to cause a few
knots in your stomach thanks to Villeneuve’s stark, uncomplicated direction.

Hugh Jackman, in the best
performance of his career plays a distraught man whose kid disappears from home
after a mysterious RV pulls up alongside his driveway. Jackman is bearded,
puffy eyed and constantly stringy and you wonder why this man is doing
commercial stuff like Wolverine when
there is a monster of a dramatic actor hidden in there. The only element in the
film that manages to rival his brilliance is Jake Gyllenhaal as the cop
investigating the case. The kid from Donnie
Darko has come a long, long way and he’s great at hinting towards the
demons in his character’s closet.

Prisoners does something different early on to bring a new twist to
the serial killer genre. What would you do if your kid suddenly disappeared and
the only suspect is let go by the cops for lack of evidence? Would you just
watch helplessly or let nihilism take over you? That’s the path that writer Aaron
Guzikowski takes to question the basics of morality, guilt, law and justice,
and he does it with stomach turning realism. As Gyllenhaal’s cop sifts through
the murky layers of strange basements, creepy clergy and sex offenders,
Jackman’s goes through a Dostoyevsky-eqsue breakdown to uncover the truth. There’s
plenty of religious symbolism but Villeneuve establishes a chilling moral
subtext to it all and lets you make judgments – little details like these is
what makes Prisoners so good. And
when you veer from feeling hate to pity for the suspect, you know you’re
watching great cinema.

Like in Incendies Villeneuve connects various strings together with a neat little
bow – even the final scene cuts to black in the most precise possible manner. Cinematographer
Roger Deakins absolutely nails the cold, isolated atmosphere here and it goes
well with the nearly nonexistent music. Villeneuve’s minimalist, fluff-free
approach to filmmaking is refreshing, as is his decision to cast the young Paul
Dano as the suspect, whose real life felony is being criminally underrated.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

A character in The Lunchbox
wistfully notes that if a man who slipped into coma ten years ago woke up
today, he’d be disgusted with what’s become of the world and he’d rather go
back into coma than live this unspectacular life.

However, if that man watched The
Lunchbox, he’d perhaps relinquish his cynicism, because he’d be filled with
hope and a wonderfully upbeat sense of purpose. That is the effect that Ritesh
Batra’s debut feature has on you. It is the most optimistic film of the year,
and one of the best. Batra is our very own Ramin Bahrani.

Happiness is relative and
nostalgia is a drug – both these themes jimmy in and out of every scene in The
Lunchbox. Yet the direction is so slight, the film barely even registers as a
film. Batra, working with Bahrani’s director of photography Michael Simmonds,
directs with warmth and affection for his characters and adds subtle poignancy
to their story. There are no dramatic twists in The Lunchbox and there is
believability to all the characters in it. Moreover it’s a pleasure to see a
Hindi film that exudes a mature portrayal of adult characters who put their
vulnerability on the line. It’s almost as though Batra made this film for the
sole purpose of changing the rules of Indian cinema.

Irrfan Khan plays Saajan, an
aging grouch nearing the end of his professional career. Saajan is Carl
Fredricksen crossed with Max Goldman and Frank
Slade. He’s the neighborhood uncle who stands alone in
the balcony and refuses to return cricket balls when they fall in his garden.
People put up with him, rather than enjoy his company. His abhorrence for human
interaction hilariously contrasts with his assistant’s (Nawazuddin Siddique)
overfriendly nature. Nimrat Kaur is Ila, a young, unhappily-married woman whose
sad, expressive eyes mirror the life that is passing her by. Apart from a
friend and confidante in her neighbour Mrs Deshpande, Ila is utterly alone in
her contemplative gloom.

Saajan and Ila somehow manage to
contact each other via handwritten notes in a lunch box. It’s a ridiculously
romantic plot device, buoyed by terrific performances from Khan and Kaur. It is
a pleasure to watch these two characters charm each other with moments of quiet
vulnerability. At times, the film even flirts with the familiar tropes of a
miscommunication and that of the hero running after the girl to win her back,
but Batra somehow finds new ways to prance over the clichés, letting the story
eventually fade out like a cute little daydream. Batra’s camera, like Saajan,
goes through the motions of the world around him but lingering on details, instead
of zipping away. Nobody in Bollywood does that. Done by a less talented
filmmaker, it would seem indulgent or mundane.

Khan has never been one to dive
head first into the golden pond of commercial success – his roles have skewed
formula time and again. It’s as if he’s afraid of being mediocre and forgotten,
and keeps outdoing himself in every role. Nimrat’s debut as a leading lady
should catapult her to instant stardom – holding her own opposite Khan requires
massive talent. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s extended cameo is charming to say the
least, and Bharati Achrekar’s voicing of Ila’s neighbour is both hilarious and
awesome.

There are plenty of moments to
treasure in The Lunchbox, and they’re all small and delicately crafted. Those
looking for romance will swoon with delight as they discover two lonely people
can find a way to make things work. Even loveless, heartless audiences would
probably have to to try really hard to appear unmoved. In one scene, Saajan
notices his neighbours eating dinner, sitting around a table, passing food to
one another, chattering as families do. When one of the family members – a little
girl who he didn’t let into his garden to get a misdirected cricket ball –
notices he’s watching, she goes and shuts the window. Later, he eats his dinner
alone. It’s one of the many scenes in The Lunchbox that make you sigh with
gratitude for their emotional whiplash. That’s when you realise Indian cinema
is undergoing a renaissance, right in front of your eyes.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Fruitvale Station won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance this year,
and it is quite obvious why. The film is not just well made but also an important one, given its context. It’s also not a film as much as it is a heartfelt paean for the
utter lack of justice in the world.

On New Year’s Eve 2009 America
was shocked by an incident of police brutality against a young black man named
Oscar Grant at a subway station in California. Onlookers whipped out their cell
phones and videotaped the incident – the footage spread like wildfire and the
ugly head of racism was paraded over the internet. In Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler recounts this incident with
grit and a shade of tightly controlled anger.

Michael B Jordan, who appears in
the television series The Wire recreates
Oscar with earnest charm, making him the sympathetic everyman
without hogging the drama surrounding him. Director Coogler spends majority of
the film going through the events that led to the tragedy. Throughout the film
we meet Oscar’s family and friends, his struggle to escape the shadow of his
incarceration and deal with the lack of job offers. He is a flawed character, with
bouts of selflessness followed by moments of violence and temper. And Jordan
brings out those traits beautifully, his reactions are raw and real thus making
us connect with his character. We know how things are going to pan out for him,
but Jordan’s establishment of his character’s infirmity makes the incident at
the station all the more tragic.

The innate flaw of the film is
that it relies too heavily on the assumption that the audience will already be familiar with Fruitvale. That might work in American theaters but most foreign audiences probably wouldn’t be aware of the incident. It’s a tiny, but
important snag, and Coogler tries to bypass it by including real archive
footage in the narrative early on. What he does best, however, is he ascertains
the racial overtones without sermonizing on them. That makes Fruitvale Station the anti-Crash, and a damn good film to boot.

A Formula 1 driver is in the pit
lane during a race, dark rain pounds the circuit, and visibility is almost
zero. The driver loses track position as the cars that didn’t pit storm past. He
needs to win the race to win the championship, and it would be suicidal to
attempt overtaking. The driver says ‘Fuck it’ as his car storms out of the pit
lane and overtakes ten cars in one go. Rush
is a wet dream for Formula 1 fans, and one of the most thrilling and entertaining
auto racing based movies ever made.

The Frost Nixon writer-director team of Peter Morgan and Ron Howard not
only understand the spirit of Formula 1 but also know how to tell a compelling
F1 story to people who aren’t familiar with the sport. Rush chronicles the incredible cutthroat rivalry between former F1
legends James Hunt and Niki Lauda, and does it in style. Howard and Morgan
jettison biopic and sports drama clichés and instead deliver a smart, gripping and gorgeous movie. It helps that the film stars the hugely
charismatic Chris Hemsworth as Hunt and Daniel Bruhl as Lauda – both actors not
only look like the people they play
but are also pretty spot on in their mannerisms.

The title of the movie might seem
mundane but you’ll relate to it the moment it begins. Most auto racing films contain
tacky looking hyper edited scenes that cheat their way to give the impression
of speed. This is not the case with Rush,
because Howard and his DOP Anthony Dod Mantle have filmed the racing
sequences with such energy you feel your blood pumping in your chest.
They pull the camera back to actually show the racing instead of jamming it
against the actors’ faces. The stylized edits are there too, but Howard and
Mantle do it with snazzy new techniques, maintaining the tasteful sophistication
of F1 and without giving in to the silly action spectacle of the Fast and Furious films.

The detailing is
pretty slavish as well – Howard captures every minute element of an F1 race,
from the cars to the circuit to the frenzy of the chequred flag. Those familiar
with the story of Hunt and Lauda will be glad to see the respect given to the
sport, the drivers and their battle, while others will be biting their nails to
figure out who ends up winning the championship.

The visual beauty of Rush is complemented by the film’s solid
narrative. Just like a Ferrari the film zooms past its two hour runtime. Howard sold out and messed up factual accuracy in A Beautiful
Mind but he seems to have learned from his mistakes. Rush boldly sticks to the facts surrounding Hunt and Lauda without Hollywoodizing
the story, and it is a bonus that their lives were just like a massive dramatic
Hollywood film. The fierce enmity, mutual respect and insecurity between the
two drivers is superbly established.

Last year’s F1 documentary Senna was a well made albeit one-sided
story of its protagonist, but Howard and Morgan delve into the unsympathetic
sides of Hunt and Lauda as well. And surprisingly, they do it without making it melodramatic.
Lauda suffered a horrible accident in the middle of the season where he battled
against Hunt for the championship – but Howard films Lauda’s tragedy and the
events that follow in such a way that you end up cheering for the character
rather than feel pity for him. There are plenty of heroic moments in the film and
you can’t help but clap till your hands bleed.

Friday, September 13, 2013

I have peered into the dark, dank
chasm of bubbling sulphuric acid where humor unwillingly takes a dip and dies a
slow screechy excruciatingly painful death. The chasm is called Grown Ups 2.

Every time Adam Sandler makes a
movie, the comedy quotient of the world shrinks by a few degrees, but with Grown Ups 2 it approaches apocalyptic
levels of low. That the first Grown Ups was
an affront to cinema, humor, celluloid, art and the environment is well known,
but the sequel elevates terribleness so high up the film becomes borderline
hazardous to humans. It’s a bit unfair to call the audiences stupid for
watching Sandler’s films, but the knowledge of the man making twelve $100
million films in his career makes me want to grab a flamethrower and set the entire
human race on fire. We have failed as a species and we deserve death and even
more horrifying punishments, like Grown
Ups 2.

The gang from the original film
is back, and is puckered up even more tightly to flex its back cleavage for our
hungry eyes. Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock and David Spade reunite for a decomposing landfill of stupid skits, lame puns, sexist
one-liners and offensive sight gags. The plot is pretty much nonexistent, even though the ‘story’
is written by three (yes three) people who presumably stay in a redneck farm where
wrestling naked with pigs in the mud is considered avant-garde art. I also
assume that these same people snigger every time someone says the words 'pussy', 'balls', ‘ass’,
‘homos’, ‘fags’ and consider roadkill necrophilia as rib tickling comedy.

The above presumptions were made
because Grown Ups 2 is full of scenes
that resemble animal excreta but are passed off as comedy. In one scene a man
in really small shorts climbs a rope and everyone around him witnesses his
gross hairy golden globes, while a black kid remarks “Y'all he's got to put
those Easter eggs back in the basket dayummmnn”. Another scene, which becomes a
running gag and an important plot point of the film, has Kevin James doing a
Burp Sneeze Fart and espousing the values of the same to his kid. One scene has
the four heroes attending their kids’ school dance recital and ogling at the
dance trainer who displays her wares like a stripper – a police officer remarks
“I want to arrest her for disturbing the peace, in my pants”.

That funny enough for you? Maybe
you like some variety in humor. Don’t worry, Sandler’s got your back because Grown Ups 2 also has the unrelenting
hilarity of an ice cream man fixing his machine and inadvertently looking like
he’s defecating into the cones. That is indeed some A grade comicality right
there. Sandler and gang thought that all that still wouldn’t be enough to send
you to the nearest neurologist, so they even bring in Taylor Lautner from the Twilight movies as a ‘frat boy’ to destroy
whatever brain cells that remain after an hour of colossal mental torture. One
ought to thank Sandler though, because thanks to this movie the dreadfulness of
all future films will be measured on a scale of 1 to Grown Ups 2.

Imagine I Saw the Devil with the fun stripped out, or The Horseman without actual choice, characters, or consequences. That
is what John Day is.

John Day does a few things right. It stars the venerable
Naseeruddin Shah in his best performance since Sona Spa. It is a straight up revenge thriller without any songs to
interrupt the flow. It’s shot in some locations that have seldom, if not never
been used in Bollywood thrillers. Some of the dialogues are good. We've now
reached the end of the rosy section of this review.

The best thrillers are the ones
with an imaginative protagonist, story or climax. There is absolutely nothing
about the characters, story, or climax of John
Day that is new, exciting or fun. Every single element of the film is
borrowed from the Spanish film La Caja
507. In any case the story doesn't matter, and first time director Solomon mixes
the Spanish film and Bollywood chestnuts for something that feels both bland
and routine.

The protagonist (Shah) is out for
revenge, hunting down the people who killed his daughter. He is so overcome
with vengeance he procures a gun and goes from realizing everyone he loves is
dead to shooting bad guys in about 30 seconds. That plot would have been fun
had it not been for the fact that John
Day is content with getting in its own way as much as possible. The film
might work as a slice of bold cinema that goes against the commercial Bollywood
route, but as a standalone movie it is maddeningly dull and bad. None of John Day’s ideas are fully explored, so
the film feels like a series of check lists in a world that is hard to care
about, in which a dull character is doing dull things against dull stock
enemies using dull guns and dull investigative methods.

To lift the film from the
constant dullness Solomon inputs loud blaring Gospel based music at every
dramatic turn, with hilariously bad heavy handed Christian imagery. Someone is
shot, and the chanting music kicks in; like RGV’s Govinda Govinda the chants
here are JEEEESUS HOO HAA HOO HAAA. It's absurd and pointless. Why can't this
film be subtle? What think tank members sat down and said that the only way to convey
the Christian themes to the viewer is by beating up the protagonist in front of
a Church and having him bleed on the cross? Why should a film that goes against
Bollywood tropes embrace the very same tropes every now and then? You walk into
this movie expecting something different and you’re treated with clunky formula
that takes you out of the story.

The investigation that the
protagonist does isn’t too exciting either – Shah simply ambles from point A to
point B before the film tells you that he’s accomplished his mission. The only
thing that adds tension to the film is the dynamics of Shah’s and Hooda’s
characters hunting down each other. And even that isn’t explored much and it feels
more like filler to justify the bloody violence. John Day also doesn't have a good way to make us empathize with the
characters of Shah and even the corrupt cop of Hooda. There is no personality
in them - they’re just cardboard cutouts with hackneyed problems of alcoholic
spouses and the guilt of estrangement, both of which are clumsily established
and severely underdeveloped. There’s a gamut of recognizable faces in the
supporting cast including Vipin Sharma, Anant Mahadevan, Shernaz Patel,
Makarand Deshpande yet none of them are memorable as such.

Moreover, the villains are so
poorly sketched out its amusing. Sharat Saxena, in a laryngitis voice seems to
be great big baddie, but a baddie with great integrity, and no one really
explains why. But that's fine, you’re supposed to be content to just let
Naseeruddin Shah slaughter baddies as he follows the clues. What really
destroys the film is that even in the final hour it never feels like anything
is at stake. The climactic scene falls completely limp because the story never
makes you care about anything that's going on. The film never presented me a
hook to continue watching and ultimately I could finish watching John Day because I am a huge film buff,
and the process was a struggle. Most film viewers will be fine skipping it
altogether.

Monday, September 9, 2013

What if there was a secret group
of individuals who formed a cult and had access to the dirtiest secrets of the
biggest corporations in the world? What if their intention was to bring down pharmaceutical
companies that knowingly kill millions of people with their drugs’ side effects?
Would you side with the cult for their quasi noble albeit vengeful intentions,
or would you expose the cult and let the law take its course?

This impossible choice is faced
by the protagonist of The East, a
small independently produced and criminally overlooked film that is one of the
most interesting thrillers of the year. The filmwas written by and stars Brit Marling, the gorgeous talented young
woman who hit the indie circuit three years ago with the brilliant sci fi Another Earth and Zal Batmanglij’s cult
thriller Sound of my voice. She
reteams with Batmanglij here and the story is similar to their
previous collaboration - The East alsochronicles a character who infiltrates
a shadowy cult but gets lost in the battle between the right and the wrong.

What makes The East a fascinating watch is how thematically relevant the
story feels, despite its many implausible twists and turns. Batmanglij, apart
from having an awesome name is good at making a tall story 'realistic'. He does this
by dabbling in ‘real world’ scandals like corporations knowingly draining toxic
effluents in rivers when no one’s looking, or pharma companies treating humans
as guinea pigs, or large conglomerates indulging in price fixing. This sort of
stuff doesn’t just exist in pulp novels, it happens every day in your town. In
fact director Steven Soderbergh, his frequent writer Scott Burns and Tony
Gilroy who wrote the Bourne films have stated over and over again that
pharma-based scandals are an immediate threat to the world and are grossly
overlooked by the media and investigators. With all this nasty shit happening
the formation of an Environmental Terrorist Group like The East doesn’t sound so far-fetched. There already are people
like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and the Hacktivist group Anonymous, and they’re not much
different from The East.

While making the story germane is
a coup in itself, The East would’ve
looked silly had it been handled by a less talented filmmaker and cast. Marling
plays a high level private investigator who penetrates the cult to gather
evidence to hand them over to the cops, but finds herself falling for charms of
the cult’s leader. She is supposed to be a former FBI agent, and the scenario
of such a strong, intelligent, happily married person falling for a charismatic
cult leader and changing her stance after seeing the wrongs of villainous corporations sounds silly on paper. This is a tough role to pull off in a serious film and Marling somehow
manages to make her transformation believable. The film even directly connects
with Sound of my voice as an Easter
egg, you’d need to watch both the
films to appreciate Batmanglij’s cheeky indulgence.

Alexander Skarsgard plays the leader
of The East – he isn’t as hypnotic as John Hawkes in Martha
Marcy May Marlene (a much superior cult based thriller) yet manages to have
a strong screen presence. There’s even Ellen Page in a small but important role,
but the film’s best attribute is the way it makes you ponder over the righteousness
of an anarchist cult. Films like Martha
Marcy May Marlene give a downright negative view of ochlocracy by focusing
on the weird customs of a cult, but The
East makes you wonder how ‘decent’ and ‘civilized’ you are as someone working in a scummy corporate world. We look down upon cults due to their
bizarre sexualized practices, yet we are content to trample upon colleagues to
climb the success ladder, treat women like objects, knowingly amount to the
genocide of thousands of human guinea pigs and still consider ourselves as
noble and ‘cultured’.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

What a divisive film Riddick is.
On one hand it is much better than the misguided hot mess that was The Chronicles of Riddick, but on the
other hand it is a horribly clunky 80’s style film and is still a far cry from
the sleek thrills of Pitch Black.

You’ve got to hand it to director
David Twohy – the only thing he has done in the past thirteen years is make Riddick films with Vin Diesel, so their
dedication to the material deserves a hat tip. This is their Avatar. They’ve created a whole
futuristic otherworldly universe, except with an antihero at the center. And
they deserve even more praise because hardly anyone else in the world is making
big budget hard R sci fi films, so the fact that Riddick is playing in theaters
and is not terrible is a feat in itself.

The story picks up after the
events of the second movie, but those who haven’t seen the previous film need
not worry because of its sheer inconsequentiality. Riddick is now marooned on a
planet full of creatures who want to eat him alive, and his only way out is to somehow
activate a distress signal and get someone to pick him up. But seeing as he’s a
wanted criminal a bunch of intergalactic bounty hunters descend upon his
location to nab him and make some quick cash.

This is a plot that is incredibly
reminiscent of the first film, and the movie seems almost like a reboot, which
is where things start to tank. There is nothing else in the film apart from the
singular danger of aliens emerging from the ground when it gets dark and the ship’s
crew running around shooting things to deal with Riddick and get the hell out
of there. This is a little frustrating because we’ve already seen this done in
a much better fashion back in 2000, and that film even had the talented Radha Mitchell in the lead role.

What is really bizarre is the constant,
blatant misogyny in this film – the lone female character played by Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackoff is
a standard issue ‘hot’ soldier from 80’s Hollywood who is hit on by nearly
everyone in the film in various disgusting ways. Why are there rape innuendos
in a film where Vin Diesel has to kick alien ass? The woman even develops
feelings for Riddick just because he is a hunky dude with fine ass ‘ceps. Does
not compute.

Riddick works when it isn’t trying to be like the first film or
isn’t dabbling in misogyny. The action is fun, and the raw gritty hard science
fiction aspect of it is a nice change from flimsy fare like Oblivion. The creatures though limited
in variety are quite imaginative, and there’s even an alien dog to give Riddick
company. But that’s about it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the love
triangle and rom-com a la Bollywood has been redefined: Shuddh Desi Romance is
a classic and one of the best dissections of a relationship that has ever come
out of the Hindi film industry. Audiences failed writer Jaideep Sahni in 2009
when they didn't flock to theatres to watch his utterly brilliant Rocket Singh,
but he's brushed away that film's failure and come back even stronger.

Shuddh Desi Romance appeals not
only to college kids or married couples or the ‘arty’ crowd, but to anyone and
everyone. It’s competent, challenging, bright, delectably-relatable and
heartfelt and hopefully, it that signals the beginning of a major shift in the
industry and the audiences’ taste in mainstream feel-good Hindi cinema.

Director Maneesh Sharma and
writer Jaideep Sahni have crafted an entertainer that defies every beat of a
traditional desi rom-com, and they’ve done it with such expertise and sincerity.
By ignoring the Bollywood rulebook and not bothering about any particular
audience demographic, the duo have created a light-footed and sassy film that
remains true to its characters. And what sharply drawn characters these are –
he’s indecisive, she’s needy, then he becomes needy, she becomes indecisive;
they hurt each other, but they love each other, yet they gradually get on each
other’s nerves. And as they go through all this, we get to watch. This is a
delight. We have all been in this sort of a relationship, and that makes the
protagonists as recognisable and weirdly warped as a look in the mirror every
morning.

Sharma and Sahni’s sophisticated
and incisive style of storytelling establishes the conflict between the three
characters by not relying on dramatic screaming matches, but on stinging black
comedy. This is not an easy feat to pull off in the deranged circus that is
Bollywood. Sushant Singh Rajput, Parineeti Chopra and newcomer Vaani Kapoor
understand this and are absolutely terrific in their complicated roles. Their
awesome chemistry is complimented by the way they completely swallow the
oblique dynamics between their characters. It's gratifying to see new Bollywood
actors and actresses take on an edgy, bold story with panache and deliver a new
age edgy-relations comedy drama usually associated with filmmakers like
Jonathan Levine, Lynn Shelton and Marc Webb.

Rajput may be the most likable
shuddh desi newcomer since Siddharth. He's got depth beyond goofy for sure, and
his portrayal of Raghu in Shuddh Desi Romance is so natural without it seeming
like a forced departure from his role in Kai Po Che. The lovely Chopra’s eyes
can effortlessly seduce you with their ability to show conflicting emotions.
It’s great to see that she isn’t just a one trick pony, stuck in the cheerful
feisty Punjabi kudi mould. She has genuine depth and nuance to boot. Kapoor is
quite the surprise package and the fact that she can hold her own in the
company of the other two is a testament to her screen presence. Aside from the
main three, there's Rishi Kapoor in the most charming role of his career as a
wedding planner worried about youngsters not respecting the sanctity of
marriage and the impact of this attitude on his business in the future.

Sahni’s meticulous research is on
full display here. This is not Jaipur exotica and the amount of detailing is
just extraordinary, from the costumes to the sounds to the lights to the smells
– everything feels so real and living and breathing. Even the songs are
perfectly placed, and I doubt that you’ll find a more beautifully shot desi
film this year.

The most enjoyable thing about Shuddh Desi Romance is that
Sharma and Sahni happily resist the temptation to drift into the conventional
problems of shuddh desi cultural traditions. Sloganeering and sermonising about
the ‘new age youth’ is often heavy handed, but this film has enough well-placed
laughs to bridge the cultural and generation gaps without alienating either.
There is a scene late in the film where the two girls have a confrontation, and
to say it annihilates formula and brings the house down would be an
understatement. Rather than beating you on the head with its message, the scene
charms you into seeing the characters’ point of view as your own.

It becomes clear about halfway
through the film which girl Sushant’s character will wind up with, but Sahni
constantly plays with the character by making him choose unwisely, much to our
amusement. We have all been in his situation, newly out of adolescence, eager
to be adults and utterly bungling when it comes to love and it’s damn good to
see ourselves portrayed so vividly on the big screen. Kudos, Messrs Sahni and
Sharma. More please.

I generally try to avoid feeling
depressed while writing about a movie, especially when it's a brainless,
un-classy, humourless piece of festering crud that stars not only the
thoroughly-unthreatening Prakash Raj as a villain but also has him seducing
Mahie Gill by scratching his chest and murmuring "Meeowww Meeeoowww".

Why classic films like Zanjeer
get remade into slushy puddles of horse manure is an inexplicable phenomenon,
much like alchemy – except in this case gold becomes trash instead of the other
way round. To those who counter Zanjeer's lack of intelligence with the ready
advice of, "Hey it’s a masala movie so turn off your brain and
enjoy", I don’t have a switch to just turn my brain off. If I did, maybe
I’d be make a film like Zanjeer instead of writing about it.

Zanjeer is not just a bad film,
it is proof of a filmmaker who is barely even trying. To say this remake
defecates upon the legacy of the original film would be giving it too much
credit. The film doesn’t waste any time in establishing its terribleness –
while the 1973 original opened with a gritty scene at a police station,
Lakhia’s remake opens with a wannabe James Bond number with females clad in
S&M costumes, lasciviously touching chains (to modernise the Zanjeer
innuendo) and writhing in orgasmic pleasure. In the original Amitabh Bachchan
makes a low key entry as he wakes up from a nightmare (he probably dreamed
about Priyanka Chopra in the remake, but more on that later). In this film, our
hero Ram Charan makes an entry with a large establishing shot of his dad
Chiranjeevi and beats up gundas as 'Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram' blares in the
background. People look on, nodding their heads to the rhythm and applauding.
Yeah, real subtle.

Lakhia isn’t interested
respecting Prakash Mehra; he is just hell bent on assaulting the audience with
an endless array of cheap jokes, gratuitous violence, generic item songs,
unpleasant characters in garish costumes and a deluge of bad acting. In one
scene, Prakash Raj licks his lips and says "Chicken and chicks are the two
meows of life". In another, a little boy at a hospital asks a policeman,
"Uncle mere daddy kahan gaye?", despite his daddy lying next to him,
burnt to char. This film is not merely cacophonous; it is spiteful, as if
Lakhia wants to lace the cartoonish 'Simbly South' style of Rohit Shetty with
the smutty Mumbaiyya masala of Sanjay Gupta. As a result, the tone of Zanjeer
wavers from dreadfully unimaginative to smugly lazy.

When the director makes no effort
to make an interesting movie, one relies on the actors to compensate. Sadly the
talent on that front is equally abysmal. Ram Charan, a superstar in the South,
achieves the impossible feat of being even more wooden than John Abraham. The
guy’s facial muscles are so tightly attached, his eyelids would close if he
scratched his cheek.

If you thought Priyanka Chopra
couldn’t do anything more embarrassing than Exotic, you’re in for a real
surprise. She plays a rich NRI who flies to India to attend a Facebook friend’s
wedding, does an item number at said wedding and becomes the surrogate wife of
a police officer she meets a day later. She does bubbly, she does Pinky, she
does slapstick, she does quirky and she does cute, all at once. Maybe her
character is a parable of the human condition, or an allegory of psychic
intervention, or social commentary regarding the existence of bipolar serial
killers breeding in our midst. I have no idea.

What is most annoying about
Zanjeer is that it's a filthy leech of a movie that simply uses the rights it
owns and absolutely desecrates the sanctity of the original. Lakhia goes so far
as to use the late journalist J Dey as a character and caricaturises him.
Because that’s what a crime journalist who chronicled the underworld and
eventually paid for with his life deserves – a mockery of his life's work,
Bollywood-style.